[QUOTE=Malodorous]
This is fun, in a morbid sort of way, good for the halloween season. Here’s some more I thought of:
"Eatherly never stopped having nightmares about what he had done. “He said he could feel those people burning.”
-Brother of Claude Eatherly, who chose Hiroshima as the site for the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Taken from the last line of his obituary
Actually, Claude Eatherly was a fraud/nutcase who only claimed to have been the guy who bombed Hiroshima. It was actually Col. Paul Tibbetts, who commanded the Enola Gay and who doesn’t seem to have ever lost a moment’s sleep over it.
Eatherly was a cause celebre back in the 60’s when, to quote Bernard Levin in The Pendulum Years, “Shortly after {Hiroshima} he had repented of his part in it, and for the rest of his life sought expiation by demanding, and getting, punishment. This he had achieved by taking to a life of petty crime and mental breakdown; in and out of prison and hospital, he wandered through the world, a self-created Ishmael, taking the burden of man’s terrible sin on his own shoulders.”
He was believed by millions, and his made-up claims were even the subject of a best-selling book, Burning Conscience, written by a guy named Gunter Anders, which depicted him as a latter-day Christ figure. Anders, to put it mildly, skimped somewhat on his research, unquestioningly believing everything Eatherly told him. The whistle was finally blown by an author named William Bradford Huie, in a book called The Hiroshima Pilot.
To quote Levin again “…Huie’s version of the Eatherly myth, though it disposed of it, was not thought, in the circles in which Anders’ version had had the force of scripture, quite comme il faut: some journals that had been keenest on the earlier version thought it better not to discuss the later, and to this day there are certainly many thousands, and possibly millions, who remained convinced that Major Claude Eatherly bombed Hiroshima and thereafter regretted having done so…”
And my quote? “The only rights you got are the rights to shut up and do as you’re told.” Judge Dredd {the original comic, not the awful movie}